There’s a lot wrong with struggling actor and onetime brains behind Daylesford’s Disco Bingo. Dolly Adamson, now runs Victorian based Kyneton Paranormal. Reinventing herself as a talentless con artist, Dolly claims to use a “spirit box” to talk to murdered or missing children and supposed child murderers. Dolly is running a cruel and rather dimwitted scam, which no doubt helped her win The Australian Skeptics’ Bent Spoon Award for 2026.

There were plenty of worthy contenders for the Bent Spoon this year, but a few particular things linked to Dolly led to her easily snatching victory. First Dolly is behaving like someone virtually looting any possible tale that might attract attention. She has spoken to the Beaumont Children who were apparently taken by a cannibal, spoken to Joan of Arc, Princess Diana, pop and rock stars and even Harold Holt. Read more about her victory here on The Medical Republic.

However, her best effort is having a quick chat to Dessie Freeman from the spirit world. This featured on A Current Affair in early June, which thankfully has a stern deconstruction from Australian Skeptics’ paranormal researcher, Richard Saunders.

Dolly opens with, “Dessie you’ve just jumped in… did you say you got killed?”.

The assistant (potentially another struggling actor) replies, “Taken by the cold”.

Dolly replied, “Ah, sorry to hear that”.

The video, now deleted by Dolly from YouTube, was recorded when Freeman was alive and well.

But the scam within the scam that infuriated this author, is that despite boasting that she uses a spirit box, you may have noticed that Dolly is fed crystal clear replies from the dead (and er… living) by her “assistant”. The assistant wears headphones and those watching hear nothing. So, what’s the problem?

A spirit box is basically an untuned radio scanner that snatches grabs of AM or FM radio. One should expect white noise, screeches, bleeps and random sounds ghost hunters associate with words. Devotees of the device claim that spirits use the wandering tuner to latch onto crude sounding “words”, and in doing so convey a message.

Even the best communicators tend to interpret one to three words and these are never in the form of a clear sentence, as Dolly and Co. produce. Indeed the phenomenon that hunters succumb to is audio pareidolia but the clincher is that the “answers” almost never have anyothing to do with the questions ghost hunters ask. Check these chaps here.

Dolly was “told” by a victim of the Erin Patterson mushroom case, “The story’s wrong”.

Dolly asks the missing mother of Savannah Guthrie, “Is there anything we can tell your children? Where did he put you?”.

The answer immediately follows; “Mountain. With lake”.

Oh really? Arizona where Nancy Guthrie disappeared has a famous hiking trail called Lake Mountain trail near the Lake Mountain complex located on – you guessed it – Lake Mountain.

At another point the assistant says “Is mummy there?”, in apparent reference to 4 year old Gus Lamont who disappeared in outback South Australia in September 2025.

Dolly offers; “Hello sweetie. Do you want to play with my dog?”

On her page promoting herself as an actor Dolly says her aim is to make people smile. Regrettably, she may be having fun but has cultivated an unlikeable persona and clearly has no idea how offensive her little gig actually is.

In response to lost work during COVID Dolly reinvented herself as the brains behind Disco Bingo in Daylesford. Still, on 1st May 2025 Dolly posted an offensive post recounting how Dolly and her daughter Asha along with Simone Patrice and Sarah Wright had a podcast chat with the Beaumont children. “They are dancing now. Their story has been told and they are healing on the other side with their parents.”

How predictable.

So yes, the desperate actor who seemingly has an abundance of confidence and even more callousness, thinks the entire scam is close to hilarious. In a world of make-believe acting, Dolly Adamson and her woo mates reckon they can scam and fool enough people to make some money.

We’ll be watching.